Editor’s introduction

Abstract

Jennifer Huberman has produced a thoughtful, nuanced essay on digital capitalism. As she insists, we cannot view this phenomenon through a single lens or narrative. Indeed, it is not clear that we can think of “digital capitalism” as a “thing” in the way that we think of, say, kinship or identity. Even without reading contemporary ethnography, sticking only to our own experience and media reports (and the ubiquitous social media), we see a wide range of “things” come down the pike: from cryptocurrency to virtual workplaces and everything else brought on by the confluence of more sophisticated communications technology, the demands of capitalism for new markets and cheaper labor sources, and of course Covid. As many pundits have declared, things will never get back to “normal,” even after Covid, if there is such a time. Those of us who have the option of working from afar will never give that up completely. Technologies and delivery systems that began as Covid workarounds will become permanent. We can screen new movies at home rather than go to the cinema. This accelerates trends that were already in place: simultaneous social isolation and immersion in social media, the replacement of face-to-face social relations with a highly curated performance of self via social media, and so forth. We have created our own Matrix. What I have just written is, I think, true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out one small detail: the vast divide within the United States and also globally between those of us who are “knowledge workers” and those whose physical labor in the material world cannot be done virtually. This largely parallels the “digital divide” between households that have adequate hardware and connectivity to allow children to attend school from home via Zoom, and those who must, say, drive to a McDonalds to get free Wifi. In this way we see technology playing a role it has always played in capitalism: changing the rules of the game in a way that benefits some (in our case, not just the capitalists but the professional classes) at the expense of the workers. Just as the shift in the textile industry from piecework to industrial production took power away from workers in 19th-century England, so the new shifts are further disempowering workers, who are nonetheless told that they are “essential.” Amazon workers, for instance, truly are